Poseidon's Scar Page 3

  They came to her at night, a mob of sailors, intent to throw her overboard, or worse. But the captain—stinking of bourbon, but fierce and commanding—called upon their decency and mocked their superstition. The men relented.

  And the next day, the storm passed.

  The navigator was astounded. He could not place them on a map. They’d been driven so far off course he had no bearing on where they found themselves, waiting for night to fall so he could plot their course using the ancient rules of the stars.

  The sea drew calm. It was as though they sailed upon glass. The engines, by some miracle still functional, plugged along, but not knowing where they might be, they simply pushed their way south, hoping to find their way again.

  Night fell again. The navigator looked to the stars. He laughed. It was not a joyful laughter, and bordered on hysteria.

  “We’re hundreds of miles off course,” he said. “Hundreds. It’s as if that storm picked us up and dumped us on an entirely different map. This shouldn’t be possible.”

  Muireann sang. The sea sang back.

  “You’ll find land to the west,” she said. “A day’s journey. You can buy fuel there, and food.”

  “How do you know this?” the first mate asked.

  Muireann shook her head, barely more than a twitch. She sensed a growing distrust among the sailors. The captain put a hand on her shoulder. He looked older than when they began, and very tired.

  “They take credit cards on this land you’re pointing us to?” he asked. He smiled at her. It was remarkably kind.

  “I think so,” she said, smiling back.

  “You should go below deck,” the captain said softly. His next words were almost a whisper. “Lock yourself in my cabin. Don’t open the door for anyone. I’ll sleep elsewhere tonight.”

  Muireann wanted to question why, but saw the look in the eyes of the other men. If they did not find land that day, if she sent them in the wrong direction, she sensed that not even the captain could protect her from what the crew in revolt would do.

  “Thank you,” she said. And she went below.

  The captain’s quarters were sparse and cramped, but more than the other men had. She locked the door behind her and sat cross-legged on his bed, singing to herself. She drew the sphere in her pocket out to admire it, its hazy golden glow illuminating the dimly lit chamber.

  The latch on the door rustled once. An hour later, it rustled again. She could hear the men talking above her, their footfalls on the deck. She heard snippets of conversation, but nothing she could make out clearly.

  And then she heard the screaming.

  Bolting out of bed, she went to the door, but did not unlock it. Instead, she listened, her ear pressed to the door. The sailors were yelling in fear, crying out in pain. She heard the blood-freezing screech of a death rattle. Strange breathing, too, inhuman, wet and rasping, the sound of soggy footprints.

  The door began to rattle violently.

  Falling backward, Muireann looked for something to defend herself with. She found a wooden ax handle, bladeless, which she held up like a club. In the back of her mind, she tried to call up defensive magic, but her heart pounded too loudly, the fear in her chest making her sloppy and slow. She waited for the door to burst open, for some terrible thing to come charging through, but it never did. Eventually, the door grew silent, and so did the ship.

  Blood began to run under the door, deep red, like wine. Muireann pulled herself back onto the bed so the blood would not touch her feet.

  Hours went by. She did not move. She did not sing.

  Eventually, sleep took her, the sort of terrified exhausted sleep that only fear inspires. She woke hours later, the smell of blood and worse in the air, but still the ship was silent.

  She crossed the room and opened the door, her shoes sticky with congealing blood.

  In the hallway, a dead sailor lay mangled. It had been his blood running under the door. He looked as though some animal had gone to work on him.

  Muireann clutched the ax handle at the ready and moved on.

  Up on the deck, she found a massacre. Every sailor on the vessel had been brutally murdered, ripped apart like dolls. The navigator’s head rolled back and forth on the deck with the rocking of the waves, completely separated from his body.

  She found the kind captain holding his guts together, his fingers clutching at his green knit sweater. At first, she thought he was staring at her, and she rushed to help, but she found only dead, blank eyes looking back at her. She gently closed them with her fingertips.

  Muireann went to the prow of the ship, looking out across the water for any sign of what did this. The sea was empty, glittering beneath a rapidly setting sun. She sat down, cradled in the prow, and stared once again at the gleaming sphere she’d stolen.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said as the ship creaked and groaned, devoid of life in the middle of the vast blue sea.

  Chapter 4: The old spymaster

  Grimmin would never say it out loud, but he enjoyed things better when the twins were trying to usurp each other.

  The old spy loitered in the back of the council chambers, listening, as he often did, to the Atlantean leadership bicker. He had spent a long time as the personal spymaster to Rhegis, one half of the ruling family of Atlantis. Rhegis had long followed his now deceased father’s isolationist beliefs for Atlantis, keeping the kingdom unknown to the surface world.

  That philosophy had very nearly ended in outright war with Rhegis’ twin sister, Reina, who led a splinter group of Atlanteans who wanted war with humanity for the things they’d done to the ocean. Grimmin had to give Reina some credit—they all knew someone who had suffered from pollution-based illnesses, or had otherwise felt firsthand the destructive nature of humanity. But Grimmin was a soldier and strategist, and he knew the undersea kingdom was ill-prepared to go to war with the entire surface world, and he believed his prince was in the right.

  This had almost killed both him and Rhegis in recent months, something Grimmin, still healing from wounds received during an assassination attempt on his own life, would not soon forget. If not for the intervention of Rhegis’ secret daughter, Echo—who Reina had, in her most egregious error in judgment, attempted to use as a hostage to manipulate her brother—Atlantis would be at war with all of humanity right now.

  Instead, again because of Echo, brother and sister were working, albeit mostly through arguing, to build a better future for their kingdom.

  It was slow going, but at least they weren’t trying to assassinate each other, Grimmin thought. He hadn’t given up his role as spymaster, so he knew, or at least he hoped he still had the talent and contacts to know, that Reina wasn’t plotting her brother’s murder anymore.

  If someone could kill me so I don’t have to sit through another of these council meetings, though, I’d welcome the action, he thought.

  “I don’t miss these,” the man sitting to Grimmin’s left said. The spy smiled to the even older man, a former politician and ally to Rhegis named Brendis Kor. Kor came to the meetings as an advisor, but he took advantage of his advanced age to play the tired and restless card, and often came and went during the meetings to stretch his legs.

  “I used to have moments wondering if I were perhaps morally bankrupt, given my career,” Grimmin said. “But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that spies have nothing on politicians.”

  The two old men stared at the bitter arguments around the council table, made up not just of brother and sister, but each sibling’s political allies—some of whom Grimmin would have preferred to put behind bars for what they tried to do to Rhegis and Echo. But politics, he thought, is all about compromising with people you don’t like. I prefer poisoned daggers, honestly.

  He smirked as a woman put her hand on Rhegis’ shoulder as if to calm him. She had the same pale green hair as Brendis Kor.

  “Well, there is that, at least,” Grimmin said.

  Brendis grunted.

  “
Don’t play coy with me, old man,” Grimmin said. “You have been hoping your whole life that your daughter and my prince would realize they were meant for each other.”

  “I wish they realized it sooner so they might have enjoyed their lives together a bit more, is all,” Brendis said. “I mean, love is love, and when you find it, you hold onto it, but…”

  “Hard to schedule a wedding between infrastructure meetings,” Grimmin said.

  “You have children, you dastardly old spy?” Brendis said.

  “Never got around to it, sir,” Grimmin said.

  Again, Brendis grunted.

  “Can’t say you made the wrong choice. You think you worry about the world as the spymaster? Try having a child,” he said. “Worse, have a child in a world where political assassinations are a reality.”

  “I would have kept her safe,” Grimmin said.

  “I’m not saying you wouldn’t have tried,” Brendis said. “But I’m looking at an old man with a limp who almost lost his arm to an afanc.”

  Grimmin shrugged.

  “Perils of duty,” he said.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Grimmin saw one of his men, a young Atlantean soldier in deep green armor, sidle into the room awkwardly, nervously scanning the attendees.

  “Excuse me,” Grimmin said. Brendis nodded politely to him and returned to the council table, a bit of hesitancy in his step.

  Grimmin approached the soldier and pulled him aside.

  “You look like you have news for me I don’t want to hear,” he said.

  “Sir,” the young soldier said, his eyes wide. “Our patrols found something you should be aware of.”

  “I’m head of spies, not head of the military,” he said. “Why come to me first?”

  “We found it out by Poseidon’s Scar. Near the site of the… the battle,” the soldier said.

  The battle. No one had come up with a clever name for it yet—the fight for the soul of Atlantis, determined by a young woman who had never been allowed into the city before that day and a hodgepodge of allies the average Atlantean would have turned their nose up at. Stolen military hardware from the surface. A crisis averted.

  And a place no one ever really wanted to go back to anymore. But still, Grimmin had his rangers patrol there, to keep an eye on the submarine buried at the bottom of the sea, to ensure no one got any ideas about starting the revolution anew.

  “What did you find?” Grimmin said.

  “An afanc,” the young man said.

  “Well, they’re rare, but we know one considers Poseidon’s Scar its territorial waters,” Grimmin said. “Seeing one is disconcerting, but it’s not unexpected.”

  “It was dead, sir,” The soldier said.

  “Having almost been eaten by one once, I will say I’m more comfortable with a dead afanc than a living one.”

  “Sir, it had been torn apart. Partially eaten.”

  “By carrion eaters, or something else?” Grimmin said.

  “The marks were fresh, sir. The creature died an ugly death. And anything that can kill an afanc…” The soldier trailed off but looked as if he had more to say. Grimmin called him on it.

  “What else, boy?” Grimmin said. “What haven’t you told me yet?”

  “One of our squads hasn’t returned,” the soldier said. “Rangers, sir. Even if they’re deviating from their patrol, they leave word somehow. But all we found…”

  Grimmin tried to hide his concern. He’d been spymaster for decades. He should be able to mask his emotions. But somehow, in that moment, he knew his men were dead before the boy said his next words.

  “We found the corpse of one of their hippocampi,” the soldier said, referring to the large seahorses the men rode on patrol. “It was marked up much the same way as the afanc.”

  “Did you bring the body back?” Grimmin said.

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said.

  “Eaten, you say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Grimmin sighed, looking over to the council table once again.

  “Have it brought to the morgue and send someone to fetch Gilos Vos from the Academy,” Grimmin said. “Tell him we have a specimen we need his help identifying.”

  “But we know it’s a seahorse, sir.”

  “Not the horse, son. Whatever ate it.”

  Chapter 5: Ghost ships

  Echo dreamed of home.

  She grew up around the icehouse her mother owned, and memories of it—the clanking of machinery, the smell of chemicals, walking into the store room on a hot summer day and instantly being transported to another world—followed her like ghosts. I’ll never be able to go back there, she thought. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to, not with the life she had now. But the icehouse had been home, and it had been her livelihood, and, for better or for worse, it had been what she expected to be her life’s work, as much as her mother hoped for bigger things for her.

  But then her aunt, Reina, current co-ruler of Atlantis thanks to Echo’s intervention, sent monsters to steal her away in the night. She wouldn’t even know how to explain where she’d been for months to anyone back home. She wondered what the police thought—the house had burned to the ground during their escape, she knew, but no bodies would have been found. Echo, Yuri, and Meredith were, she assumed, missing persons still. Did they suspect them of arson, or murder? Did anyone care? Would anyone have taken over the icehouse business in her mother’s absence?

  I shouldn’t worry about this, she thought. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t go home again. And that’s fine.

  Artem yelling for her shook her out of her reverie and sent her springing from the hammock in which she’d been lazing and running up to the deck. She found Artem halfway up to the crow’s nest, Barnabas leaning against the rail near the bow. Both men were looking at something.

  “What have we got—oh, what the hell is that?” Echo said.

  They slowly approached a derelict craft that looked like a large, deep-sea fishing boat. It listed to one side a bit. Echo could see lights on, even in the daylight, but no movement.

  “Is there anyone on board?” Echo asked.

  Barnabas shook his head.

  “I can’t tell from here,” he said. Then, to no one in particular, “Bring us in closer.”

  Echo sensed, then saw as they began to act, the restless spirits who crewed the Endless. They were a menagerie of lost souls, ghosts dressed in the garb they wore when they sailed the seas in life. Old-timey pirates worked alongside navy men and yachters in polos and deck shoes. Barnabas had explained when they first met that the Endless was a ghost ship in a literal sense, crewed by those who have lived by the sea and were not ready to move on to the afterlife yet. This haunted ship was a place for those travelers to remain here on Earth, on the ocean, where they were happiest. They were not trapped there, and often moved on. Some might crew the ship for a few days or weeks; others had been on it for a hundred years or more. They never spoke, but Echo had come to find their presence comforting. This was their ship, and they would keep it safe. The living were just passengers.

  Good thing, Echo thought. None of us actually know how to sail this thing.

  Ropes leapt off the deck and, by unseen hands, lashed themselves to the derelict vessel as the ships met side by side. Echo picked up her trident from where she’d, irresponsibly, she admitted, left it hours earlier and jumped to the other ship easily, her Atlantean strength propelling her through the air.

  She landed on the other deck and immediately slipped, landing on her back.

  Barnabas started clapping and yelled over that he gave her a 10 for the landing. Artem humorlessly asked if she was okay.

  “I’m fine,” Echo said, pushing herself into a sitting position. The black, rubberized deck was wet and sticky. Grossed out, she lifted her hand to see what slimy fish gut-based substance she’d put her hand in.

  The palm of her hand was covered in dark red blood.

  She popped to her feet and whirled the trident i
nto a fighting pose.

  “Guys! Get over here right now!” she yelled.

  There was a heavy thump beside her as Artem dropped out of the air, somehow propelling himself off the mast in one leap. He looked at her cockily until he also slipped on the blood and fell on his backside. Barnabas carefully stepped from one ship to the other and, noticing the blood, daintily held his long coat up so it wouldn’t drag through it.

  “Seriously, guys, I don’t know who you’re trying to impress with the acrobatics. We’re right alongside the ship,” Barnabas said. “Holy hell, look at this place.”

  “We need to check for survivors,” Echo said.

  “Like hell we do,” Barnabas said. Echo and Artem glared at him with an almost identical look. “Fine. We’ll look.”

  It didn’t take them long to find the first body, or what was left of it. By this point all three of them were used to horrific sights, but the brutality they saw in the first few victims was enough to turn Echo’s stomach, and her companions didn’t look any better. Artem drew both of his short swords, and Barnabas the sabre he carried.

  “Where’s your magic flintlock?” Echo said.

  “Oh sure, now you want me to have my magic wand,” he said. “It needs one or two more enchantments before it’s ready. You’re stuck with me as-is today, your highness, and I’m not any happier about it than you are.”

  “Can you cast a spell to detect… anything?” Artem said. “Monsters? Survivors?”

  Barnabas looked at the Amazonian man quizzically, then nodded.

  “Where’d you learn about magic?” he said. Barnabas muttered a few arcane words, and a pale blue trail left his hand and darted down below deck.

  “Oh good, let’s go down into the dark bowels of the ship,” Echo said.

  Artem, without hesitation, followed the trail, taking point. Echo and Barnabas exchanged raised eyebrows.

  “I can never tell if he’s incredibly brave or possibly suicidal,” Barnabas said.

  Echo refused to respond and followed Artem downstairs.

  The smell of blood and worse was stronger here, trapped without ventilation. They came across more bodies, claw marks on the wall, an older man leaning up against one corner where he had clearly made his last stand.